


Pack up All My Cares and Woes

by rose_griffes



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: (it's implied not explicit), (well not exactly but close enough), Gen, Truth Serum, background Gaby Teller/Illya Kuryakin, endless exasperation with a slightly incapacitated boss
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:55:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28274931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rose_griffes/pseuds/rose_griffes
Summary: He remembers what drinking feels like, and opium. This is something different.
Relationships: Gaby Teller & Alexander Waverly, Illya Kuryakin & Alexander Waverly
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11
Collections: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Winter Holiday Gift Exchange 2020





	Pack up All My Cares and Woes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [diadema](https://archiveofourown.org/users/diadema/gifts).



The words don’t make sense. He stares at the faces--familiar but not quite--

What was he doing?

“You need to come with us,” says Gaby. Gaby, his agent. It clicks for a moment--a split second of lucidity in the miasma. 

“Right,” Waverly says, and tries to take a step in the direction she indicates, but then he--

He remembers what drinking feels like. The angry dullness fading to black. And opium, with its upward rush, everything brightening to an unbearably beautiful clarity. 

This is something different. 

Maybe it isn’t real? 

“Just keep moving your feet,” Gaby croons, and he shudders at the wrongness of the tone. Teller is sharp edges and a delightfully caustic sense of humor. Delightful. Caustic.

Delightful. The word swoops and swells, like a bell, like a bird. Delightful. Divine. _divine, fine, just fine am fine_

Everything lurches sideways and the acid taste of his last meal stings in his nose after he finishes retching. 

A muscular arm clad in corduroy pulls him upward again, steadying him when his feet start to slip. Kuryakin huffs out a breath at the task of holding Alex upright--a small moment of consolation, he thinks, that it actually takes a bit of effort for the man to do the work of two. 

Waverly’s stomach twists again, halting their forward momentum, and he ends up squinting at the watery sky afterwards. 

Empty. He thought his stomach had been empty before, but whatever this is, it hasn’t finished with him yet. Gaby holds a flask to his lips but he turns his head. 

“It’s only water,” she says, but he won’t drink it, _won’t won’t won’t_

_won’t wobble worry water what where_

They hobble-wobble to the car. “Four doors,” he says, and snorts when Kuryakin climbs into the back seat next to him. “Too tiny,” Waverly says of the car. “You’re too big!” The words tumble out, quick and slick, slipping past his lips before he can catch them.

Kuryakin looks toward the rear-view mirror, eyebrows pinched together. He nods with a frown and the car lurches forward. Shifting his gaze back to Alex, Kuryakin leans in and touches his forehead with the inside of his wrist.

“Not sick,” Waverly tells him. “It’s drugs.” 

“What sort of drugs?”

“Something--they said it was--synth… synth… slip…”

Slipping sliding and the road swerves and his head hurts and the trees splash, but that isn’t what trees do, is it? 

“You should pull over,” Kuryakin says, but he’s not talking to Waverly. Is he? No. Because Gaby responds, but Alex doesn’t understand what she says. 

That doesn’t worry him right now. They have this hybrid--a convergence of English, German, and Russian. A merge, a blend of Babel, babble, bottle, broken--

“Shh, just breathe,” Kuryakin says, and Alex gasps, feeling the words dribble to a stop. “Breathe through your nose. Try not to talk.” 

Right. He takes another breath, shuddery and shallow. 

“Slower,” Kuryakin tells him. “Listen to the rain.” 

They’re swallowed by it--thick and thunderous, a cacophony, a wondrous symphony. He dives into the tidal wave of sound and it obliterates, inundates, obfuscates his senses. 

Washing away, watching the waves, what is this? The echo fades and he stares at the windscreen wipers as they move back and forth, back and forth until they screech and stutter. Dry, it’s dry now and then _click_ and the movement stops.

“See if you can get him to drink,” Gaby says. “He’s probably dehydrated.”

“Yes, please.” Alex chuckles at the phrase coming out right. “I did that!” he crows, and then curses at the words still flowing out of his mouth. 

Illya holds the flask for him. “Can’t break it,” Waverly says. “It’s not glass.” 

“That is correct,” Illya responds. 

_Ugh, don’t humor me_ , Alex wants to say, but he’s so thirsty now, thirsty thirsty thirsty, and by the time he finishes drinking his thoughts have moved on. 

“Wet,” he says. “Too much rain in Wales. But water is good.” 

Kuryakin takes off his corduroy jacket and folds it into a neat rectangle. “Lean forward,” he tells him, and then puts the jacket behind Waverly’s back. “Why don’t you rest now?” 

“Why don’t _you_ rest?” Waverly snaps, and then he says, “Sorry, sorry, it seems I can’t stop speaking.”

“Close your eyes.” Kuryakin’s voice fills the small car. “Breathe in through your nose. Concentrate on this.”

* * *

He blinks. Blinks again. He’s in a car. Tiny back seat, nearly every inch of space filled with the long legs of Illya Kuryakin.

Waverly’s neck hurts but he’s strangely loath to move. The car’s movement is enough, a steady hum rumbling through him. 

_thrumming, rumble, tumble, tough…_

Oh. He closes his mouth again--a bloody miracle--and thinks. He thinks that he’s thinking, anyway. Drugged. That’s what this is. Dosed with something that is neither alcohol nor opium. 

The car’s tires swish in the light mist, _quick spins and drifts, hiss…_

If he turns his head ever so slightly, the rear windscreen fills his view. Road spooling out behind them, dark in the damp. Grey skies overhead, _moody brooding clouds looming…_

* * *

He blinks and blinks again. Stares at the trees that swirl and curl in the breeze of their passing, _a dance of delight furled in shades of green, birds chiding their interrupted sleep, keep watch can you see me in the trees?_

His fingers curl around something and he looks down at his hands. A metal flask. His hands don’t shake, which is good. 

Why is that good? Or rather, why is that unusual? It’s a confusing question. He tries to unscrew the cap, but the steady hands don’t translate to coordination in his fingers. Kuryakin takes the flask and unscrews the cap for him. 

”Better?” he asks after Waverly finishes drinking more water. 

“Yes, much. Muchly moreso my dear, I cannot lie--”

He inhales, a sharp interruption to the flow of words, and remembers to shut his mouth. So many words, tumbling out unbidden. 

Sick? No--a picture flashes into remembrance, a woman jabbing him, viscous liquid oozing from the syringe, a sneering leer on her lips. 

Or maybe he made that up. He’s not sure of anything. Alex drinks more water, words of gratitude flowing after he finishes. 

_Close your bloody mouth, man._ It takes too much concentration, so he takes another sip of water instead.

Maybe this is a dream. Dreamtime, sleep, slip, _soft slumber soothing all cares, where oh where--_

* * *

“Should we stop somewhere?” Teller’s eyes are dark in the rear-view mirror, deep golden wells, _dripping honey and lemon, tea-time, tripping--_

“You want tea now?” she asks him.

“What?”

“Macht nichts.” Ah, so this dream is in German, now? Well, that’s fine. He knows German.

“Of course you do,” Kuryakin says. 

“I do what?” Alex asks. 

“You know German.” 

“Yes. Ja. Da, pochemu my govorim o yazykakh?” 

Illya looks at him, pale blue eyes and a crinkle in between, a furrow and worried frown. _Blue eyes, blue note, a blue tit lays eight to ten eggs in its clutch over a span of several days._

Kuryakin turns his head toward the front of the car--toward Teller. Waverly knows this kind of conversation they’re having now. English-German-Russian, sometimes no words at all, and that sends him spiraling into a seething jealousy, spinning and spitting; his words are spilling everywhere and they can communicate without them? How is that fair?

“I’ll see if there’s something on the radio,” Gaby says.

“No Beatles, please. Even if they’re a tasty treat for a lapwing.” 

Illya frowns at that. “Because lapwings eat beetles,” Alex clarifies. “So do robins and martins. Curlews eat beetle larva.”

“Ich glaube, er redet jetzt über Vögel, Illya,” Gaby says. 

Waverly chuckles. “Of course I’m talking about birds.” 

Wait. Why is he talking about birds?

Gaby turns the radio on, stabbing buttons on the dashboard until she finds a song with men harmonizing about falling rain. “This will do!” she announces, sounding grimly determined.

* * *

“That looks like a cormorant,” Alex says. A comically long neck and sleek black plumage--an adult, not a juvenile, then. They must be close to the coast.

He’s not entirely sure that the bird is real. Holding his hands in front, he wiggles his fingers. “I’m not drunk,” he tells himself. 

“You were drugged,” says Kuryakin, crammed in the seat next to him. They’re in the back seat of a car--an MG 1100, it looks like--and that means that Teller must be driving. 

“We are going in circles,” Illya mutters. Waverly thinks that Kuryakin must be real. He doesn’t believe that his brain would be cruel enough to place him in the backseat of an MG 1100 with six feet five inches of surly Russian. 

“I heard that,” Gaby snaps.

Silence again. Alex stares out the window, but the cormorant is too far away to see now. If it was real in the first place.

* * *

The car hums, and Teller and Kuryakin argue in their blended language. They have this strange synchrony, an almost eerie ability to communicate even without a common first language. 

Words. Words and woe, where to go, yes and no. What?

“I think I’ve been drugged,” Alex says. “This doesn’t feel right.” 

Kuryakin doesn’t look surprised. A memory, or something else, flashes into his mind’s eye: Kuryakin’s arm, reaching toward him. Did Illya drug him? No… No? Why would he do that?

Teller wouldn’t let him, if she knew about it.

“We should stop soon,” Gaby says. Kuryakin presses his lips together but doesn’t say anything. “What are we close to?” 

Unfolding a section of map again, Kuryakin attempts to say Welsh city names aloud. At least, that’s what Waverly supposes the man is doing. Alex catches part of the argument they’re having: stop in a city along the main road or go to a smaller town. 

At least one place name sounds familiar, but he doesn’t know why. Bloody Wales. Bloody accents. Bloody bother of Babel where languages blend and bobble, a blur.

He stares at his hands. Tries unscrewing the cap on the flask, and lets out a _hah!_ of triumph when he succeeds. 

Question: what is in the flask? Because he doesn’t drink anymore. Was he intending to drink whatever is in here when he started opening it? Even if it’s safe to drink, he’s not actually thirsty right now. Or maybe he is? It’s hard to tell. His body keeps sending contradictory signals. 

“It’s only water,” Kuryakin says. “And if it’s empty, we get more.”

Turning, turning. He twists the cap on and off. Shakes the flask, which is mostly empty. Looks out the window. A peregrine wings past and he tracks its path, turning his head to follow and then he’s dizzy muzzy slightly fuzzy--

Wait. Why is Gaby in the back seat now? 

“We changed places,” Teller says. “In case anyone is paying attention. Illya will be the chauffeur and bodyguard, I’ll be the concerned daughter, and you’ll be my father, who is ill.” 

“Indisposed would be a better term.” 

Teller rolls her eyes and continues pinning her ponytail into a neat bun. Impressive how she can do it without a mirror. 

“It’s not that difficult,” she tells him. 

Kuryakin slows the car as they enter a village. “Chto eto?” He sounds bewildered. 

“What?” asks Gaby, and then follows the question with a confused repeat of Illya’s question. “Was ist das?”

Waverly looks around. Instead of rough grey stone, the buildings here are smooth with bright paints, lit by shafts of light as the clouds part. “Weren’t we just in Wales?” he asks. 

“We were,” Gaby says. "Are." She peers through the car windows at the houses and other buildings: sunny yellow, a warm red-orange, and turquoise shutters. Cones of white hydrangea flowers dot meticulously pruned green bushes. 

This part isn’t real. Is it? 

“It looks Italian.” Gaby looks past him at a blue and red archway built into the cliffside. “Or maybe Spanish.”

“This was the road to Portmeirion,” Illya says. 

Ah, that’s it--what had sounded familiar earlier. “Williams-Ellis!” Waverly exclaims. 

“That’s not the name,” says Gaby, frowning at him. 

“The architect who’s working on this.” Waverly smiles as they drive past more warm-toned houses and faux-Italian statuary. A bit gaudy but not without charm, he thinks. Obviously appreciated by the tourists gawking at the place, enjoying a brief respite from the rain on a late-summer day. He wouldn’t mind a bit of a stroll himself--perhaps along the inlet that they’ve glimpsed along the drive.

“We’re not letting you walk around,” Gaby says with a stern frown. “Not like this.” 

Right. He’s been drugged. Dosed. Done in by dastardly doers of--

“Let’s get you some more water,” Gaby interrupts. “Illya, keep him in the car, please.” 

Kuryakin’s cap bobs in affirmation. He turns around to face Waverly--keep a literal eye on him. Alex feels trapped, imprisoned; and it’s so sunny and lovely out there. His hand pulls on the door latch and he steps out.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the story that just wouldn't end. 🤦🏽 With hectic holiday scheduling, the ending is still being worked on. My apologies!


End file.
